Watch Out for America 2000; It Really Is a Crusade

If there's one thing that history tells us about crusades it's that
lots of people kill and get killed in them. Should it ever catch on,
the Bush Administration's "America 2000: An Education Strategy," which
Lamar Alexander calls "a crusade, not a program," could litter the
battlefield with collateral damage. Out of its grab bag of educational
jingoism, fanciful thinking, and right-wing boilerplate could come a
dark time for America's public schools.

The timing of America 2000's unveiling was masterful. For a
conservative Administration in panting need of a domestic agenda it
offered exciting prospects: a shot at pre-empting a powerful Democratic
Party issue 18 months before the 1992 national elections, the chance to
prove during a recession that money isn't everything, and, perhaps most
unsettling for school leaders, an ideal moment in history for
reappraising democratic control of public education through
no-holds-barred parental choice.

Reinforcing America 2000's tempting political pluses is Secretary
Alexander's track record as an accomplished and unflappable pitchman
for "reinventing" the schools. (Newsweek's "Conventional Wisdom Watch"
commented: "Wash. swoons over Ed. chief. Lamar, honey, you're on the CW
honor roll.") In our post-McLuhan age of information overkill and
sloppy thinking, the messenger who speaks convincingly in grammatical
sentences possesses a telling advantage. To education-oriented
Americans beyond the Washington Beltway, Lamar Alexander's reassuring
voice comes as a welcome relief from the banalities of Lauro Cavazos
and the outbursts of William Bennett. He is George Bush's new
home-front weapon, quietly certain of his case, tenacious in pressing
it--and ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The propelling theme of America 2000's 34 pages is the highly
dubious proposition that our public schools are beyond hope or repair.
Their rotten performance, swollen bureaucracies, and outdated methods
consign them to education's junkyard. But they will need replacing,
preferably by something really grabby, goes the reasoning. So let's
enlist the services of our successful brethren in business. They know
how to get things done, and they're great at research. Then each
senator and congressperson will get a brand-new million-dollar school,
our children will conform to tougher new standards and face new
batteries of modern-era examinations, and Ozzie and Harriet will spring
back to life with a ready-made family of clean-cut kids prepared to
face a color-blind world bursting with opportunity.

Season the mix with an unleashing of "America's creative genius" and
a couple of recognition and training programs, and, voila, education's
brave new world is upon us. Best of all, it will take until at least
the end of the century before anyone can really check on how it is
faring.

This biased oversimplification doubtless does a disservice to Mr.
Alexander and his energetic brain trust. But not too much of one, for
America 2000 is simplistic educational ideology run rampant. Implicit
in it, and explicit in the pronouncements of members of the Secretary's
kitchen cabinet, is a set of abiding convictions that concerned
citizens and professional educators must be prepared to weigh. To buy
in to the crusade's most prominent feature is to believe, as the
Secretary does, that we have already made our choice in favor of
choice. Only the details need working out for private education to move
from bit player to center stage in the nation's school play. But what
details! For starters, let's try constitutionality, civil-rights laws,
parental roles in private for-profit enterprises, and, towering above
all others, ticketing millions of low-achieving poor children for
education's scrap heaps.

Maybe these "details" can be worked out. But not by promoting
unproven assumptions that far exceed the premises of carefully designed
public-school choice.

To the gurus who helped inspire Mr. Alexander's crusade, public
education's information base is badly skewed. Though Mr. Alexander's
band numbers several certified social scientists who surely understand
how learning happens and how public institutions react to social
change, they prefer to treat federally sponsored research in education
as another lost cause that government need no longer support. Even
though federal R&D was making an admirable recovery from the
chaotic 1980's until Christopher Cross was dumped as assistant
secretary for educational research and improvement a few weeks ago,
they now propose to hand educational research over to private
interests. Remember, you saw it here first: If it ever gets off the
ground, this turkey is headed for a bumpy flight and a crash landing,
possibly accompanied by hints of arm-twisting and super-creative
financial shenanigans.

And who nominated American business for beatification? Where did we
get the idea that industry and commerce are doing so much better than
the schools? From Lee Iacocca? Donald Trump? Ivan Boesky? The banking
business? Secretary Alexander's devotion to the free-enterprise system
is well known, and it's genuinely heartening to see so many
corporations so constructively involved in helping schools. But, as the
political economist Robert Reich has pointed out, "the suggestion that
the private sector is taking--or will take--substantial responsibility
for investing in America's work force is seriously misleading." It
might be diverting to see whether General Motors or Montgomery Ward can
design and run a decent inner-city school, but who really trusts them?
They have had trouble enough keeping themselves afloat.

While most of the content of America 2000 is disturbing, what's
missing is downright distressing. Even though it accords brief nods to
current projects and practices, its heart and mind are elsewhere. As an
educational strategy, America 2000 is a plan for Middle Class America,
where pride in academic achievement still runs high much of the time
and most people like their community's schools. That some of these
schools are performing below expectations is lamentable, but
jettisoning them in order to conform to a market-driven,
private-school-oriented vision of schooling in a responsible democratic
society is palpable nonsense. And very dangerous.

It is hardly a secret that the truly ominous crunch in our schools
is in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and the rest of
urban America. If these systems fail, we're in deep trouble. It seems
that the only people in American education who prefer to downplay that
truism (unless a few grant dollars come their way to track it) are the
architects of American 2000. How can a landmark federal document on
redefining and reconstituting education in American sail serenely past
the issues of race, class, and economics in our cities as though they
scarcely existed?

Presumably, the new crusade is another rising tide, destined, like
supply-side economics, to lift all vessels. Try telling that to such
big-city school leaders as Joseph Fernandez, Constance Clayton, or Ted
Kimbrough. Or to several million parents of children who attend
decaying urban schools. They have somehow managed to contain their
enthusiasm for the prescriptions of American 2000. What they need, of
course, is tangible help--and now--and not the Governors' Academies,
New World Standards, and New American Schools Development Corporation
the Bush Administration proposes to give them.

From its gratuitous and irrelevant kudos to Operation Desert Storm
(''a triumph of American character, ability, and technology") to its
six pages of unlikely questions and answers, America 2000 is easy to
dismiss, even to ridicule, as a sophomoric catchall of Reagan-era
bromides about the schools. It is that and less, but, as Secretary
Alexander has noted, "there will be more to it than meets the eye,
rather than less." His is the voice to heed, even when, as at the
recent San Diego seminar of the Education Writers Association, his
replies to tough questions are formulaic or evasive.

What America 2000 heralds is something radically different from the
pretentious latter-day educationese of the document itself. Flawed
though it may be, it is not unreasonable to view it as the vanguard of
a concerted attempt to complete the domestic agenda of the 1980's,
possibly as the opening blast of a renewed government wide effort to
eradicate what remains of the compassion of the New Deal and Great
Society. And who better to carry the flag than a widely admired and
successful governor who knows the subject matter inside out, is busily
cultivating James Baker-type relations with the national media's heavy
hitters, and may have a political eye cocked to 1996? Lamar Alexander
is not a man who expects his life's work to end when the American
Achievement Tests are in place.

The tone of the Bush-Alexander crusade is not offensive. No one is
fighting old wars. But it proceeds from a belief system that educators
should be most skeptical about accepting. The omission of civil rights
and equal opportunity, for example, is probably intentional; like its
predecessor, this Administration would like to see laws affecting them
rolled back or eliminated. Private education, an already strong and
generally elitist presence in our national educational profile, is
clearly viewed uncritically in larger perspective as a solution or even
as a replacement for failing public schools. And most of a decade's
work in school improvement is implicitly dismissed as immaterial to the
new strategy. What ever happened to restructuring?

These are legitimate subjects for debate. But it will be frustrating
to discuss them intelligently in the context of America 2000. In
addition to killing people, crusades don't offer much room for
negotiation. Though traditional left-right divisions in educational
policy have blurred slightly over the past 20 years, discernible
philosophical differences remain. In offering us America 2000, the Bush
Administration is attempting to define and arrogate the middle ground.
But this crusade is not a mainstream educational strategy. It proposes
a major doctrinal revolution, one that should concern anyone connected
to children and schools.

George Kaplan writes on issues of social and educational policy.

Vol. 10, Issue 35, Pages 27, 36

Published in Print: May 22, 1991, as Watch Out for America 2000; It Really Is a Crusade

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